Abstract
Ducted fan-powered ultralight (UL) aircraft UL-39 Albi has been developed at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The aircraft was manufactured by the companies LA Composite, s.r.o. and JIHLAVAN Airplanes, s.r.o. The development was funded by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic. The airframe is fully made of composite materials, mainly carbon fibre/epoxy resin prepregs, and was cured in autoclave. The design contains many unconventional features. These were necessary to meet legal requirements (i.e. maximum take-off weight and maximum landing speed) and to achieve high flight performance. This puts extreme demands to both maximisation of propulsion efficiency and minimisation of airframe and powerplant weight. This paper presents more than fifteen years’ experience with design of ducted fan powered ultralight aircraft. Some solutions of design trade-offs are presented, namely integration of engine into the fuselage, carbon composite blade design and lightweight airframe design.
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